Paying for it

“Hello, luv. Come on in. Aren’t you good, you’re right on time. Come on through to the lounge.”

The whore’s voice is light, pleasant and sounds younger than she looks.
She smiles as she gazes up into my face, standing very close but not
actually touching me, and for a moment, I could almost let myself
believe that I am the highlight of her day.

I let her lead me through the short corridor of the flat, into her
living room. She turns to face me, and makes a show of slipping off the
cotton robe she wore to open the door. She smiles again, puts one ankle
in front of the other, juts a hip, spreads her arms wide and says,
“Well, do you like what you see?”

I see what I expected to see: a middle-aged whore who is presentable
rather than pretty. She has a barrel-shaped body that lacks muscle-tone
beneath the fake tan, and a slightly over made up face framed by
shoulder length hair that has been dyed jet-black. Her outfit is a
what-you-see-is-what-you-get corset and thong affair that featured in
her website photos. But I didn’t pick her for her looks; I selected her
because of what she’s willing to do.

She is still looking at me, arms out, waiting for a response. My mind
works to recover her name. I’m not good with names so I use mnemonics
to jog my memory. I’d linked the woman in front of me to an airport—soft landings and all that—hah go it.

“It’s good to meet you, Shannon,” I say.

As soon as I hear my knee-jerk, let’s-be-polite-to-one-another
response, I recognize that I am being inappropriately formal. Good
Lord, I’m so well trained, it’s all I can do to prevent myself from
offering to shake hands. I also recognize that I carefully avoided
answering her question about whether I liked what I saw.

Shannon smiles, but this time the warmth doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
She seems to be waiting for something.

“Did you get my emails?” I ask.

Shannon lists her services on her site. It’s a long list. In my emails
I’d told her what I wanted. It’s so much easier to send those kinds of
requests off into the ether than it is to voice them in person.

“I did. You are an adventurous one, aren’t you?” Shannon says, moving
towards me until she is standing so close I have to tilt my head down
to make eye contact with her.

“It made me all hot, thinking about it.” She places one hand flat on
the lapel of my suit, “but first we have to get the formalities out of
the way so we can both relax.”

For a second I’m confused. Then I realize what she means and what she’d
really been waiting for and I feel foolish.

“Oh, the money, of course. I’m sorry. Let me just…”

I reach into my pocket and pull out some folded £20 notes, hoping I
don’t look over prepared or that the fact that I didn’t bring my wallet
doesn’t make me look untrusting.

Shannon takes the money with more grace than I mustered to offer it.
She lets her fingers slide briefly over mine in a gesture that seems to
have as much to do with establishing intimacy as it does with
collecting money.

“Why don’t you put your bag down, take the weight off your feet and get
comfy,” she says gesturing towards the couch and turning away from me,
presumably to secure the cash somewhere.

It’s only then that I remember that my laptop bag, so much a part of my
corporate uniform that I no longer notice it, is still on my shoulder.
I’m standing in the living room of a whore to whom I’ve made my darkest
requests and I’m wearing a suit, a neatly knotted tie and carrying my
laptop. I want to slap myself for being… well, for being me.

Except that I’m not really behaving like me. I haven’t been behaving
like me for a month now. I’ve never been with a whore before. I never
thought I would be with one. I’m not that kind of man. At least, I
didn’t used to be. Up to now I’ve been the kind of man who met his mate
at eighteen and has been with her ever since. And yet here I am,
squeezing in a session with a whore on my way home from Manchester
Airport as if I were attending another business meeting.

I know this is insane. I knew it as I searched the web to find the
right whore, as I edited the emails to make sure my requirements were
completely clear, as I changed my agenda so that I could take an
earlier flight home. It didn’t change anything. Perhaps that’s the
thing about being insane: you know you shouldn’t do something but you
do it anyway.

Shannon is back, standing in front of me, her legs spread so that they
are on either side of my knees. She bends forward at the waist, reaches
behind her and removes the bra section of the corset. I wonder briefly
if it was attached by Velcro.

Shannon lets her breasts dangle in front of me. They are tanned but
attenuated, hanging like slightly under-filled pouches. I know from her
pictures that when she stands up her breasts will rest like flaps on
her chest. She would fail Janice’s pencil test for sure.

Janice is my wife. She has always had large breasts of which she is
rightly proud. She once demonstrated for me the pencil test she uses to
see if her breasts are still firm. She lifted a breast, held a pencil
horizontally at the base of the breast and then released the breast and
the pencil. She told me that if the pencil fell her breasts were firm.
If the pencil was trapped by the breast then they had started to sag.

I retrieved the pencil from where it had fallen on the bed, cupped
Janice’s now proven-to-be-firm-enough breast and asked her if she
wanted to take the penis test. She grinned and let me demonstrate a
test that I claimed involved placing my erection where the pencil had
been.

When she asked me how she would know if she’d passed. I told her that
if the erection felt hard enough to be mistaken for a pencil then we’d
both passed.

“Do you like the rings, luv?” Shannon says, bringing my attention back
to where it should be. She talking about the thick metal rings that
pierce her nipples and what are currently hanging straight down. I’ve
never seen piercings this close. They are fascinating in a slightly
scary sort of way.

“You can touch them if you like,” she says.

From behind the mental glass of my I’m-not-really-in-charge-of-this
mood. I observe my hand moving up towards Shannon’s breast. A rapid
sequence of images flash across my imagination: pulling on those rings
until the breasts are stretched like sheets on a line, twisting them
between my finger and thumb, hanging weights from them a little at a
time until she can bear it no longer.

Fortunately I am not yet that kind of man. Instead, I run the tips of
my fingers along the underside of her hanging breast until my middle
finger catches on the ring and sets it swaying.

I wait for my cock to stir but nothing happens. Shannon’s skin is
smooth but feels a little cool to the touch, as if she needs to put on
a sweater. I smile at the inappropriateness of the thought.

Shannon laughs. “I knew you’d like these piercings,” she says, pulling
on the other ring so that the nipple stretches. “I think you’ll like
the ones down below even more.”

I know from my research on her website that Shannon is referring to the
piercings in her labia and clitoris. The pictures I studied showed two
rings in each labia and a strange little dumbbell through the clitoris.

Shannon waits a second, as if expecting me to do something. I stay
still, my eyes fixed on her nipples. I’m distantly aware of an
excitement, like the pressure you feel on your ears when you gain
altitude suddenly. But I haven’t yet worked out what to do about it.

Roughly and with surprising strength, Shannon pushes my shoulders back
into the sofa and straddles me, settling her weight where my erection
should be and forcing her breasts up towards my face.

I kiss her breast more from reflex than desire. My mouth and tongue set
to work, suckling and nibbling with skill and enthusiasm. It is as if
they have been rehearsing for this when I wasn’t looking. The sensation
of the ring in my mouth is unfamiliar and not entirely pleasant. I
release it slowly, careful not to let it catch on my teeth.

I look up and catch an expression on Shannon’s face that tells me I’m
behaving oddly. She smiles brightly when I make eye contact. She must
be used to odd. I imagine it’s violent and odd that she’s worried
about.

“Tell you what, why don’t we go into the bedroom?” Shannon says,
standing up and holding out her hand to lead me. “You can get out of
your clothes there and I can do all those naughty things you asked
for.”

“That would be nice.” I hear myself say as she helps me up.

The bedroom is small and lit only by the sunlight that filters through
the thin orange curtains that have been closed across the only window.
A fresh sheet has been laid across the top of the bedspread. A
hideously pink plastic dildo stands to attention next to a large jar of
Vaseline on the small bedside table. I wonder if these things are given
balls just to make them easier to retrieve.

Shannon is behind me. She has pulled my jacket off my shoulders and is
now pressing herself into my shirt-clad back. The jacket lies in a heap
at her feet. She reaches around me, undoes my belt and trousers with
practiced ease and runs her hand lightly over my genitals as she pushes
the trousers down around my ankles.

She squats by my side and lifts my feet out of the trousers like a
smith shoeing a horse. Still squatting, she reaches up and pulls down
my boxers.

My cock is only slightly engorged. The foreskin still covers most of
the head.

Shannon pushes the foreskin back gently. I can smell my own musk.

There is another momentary pause that tells me that somehow I have
deviated from the normal script for how these things are done. Then
Shannon says, “Well, I am a lucky girl today aren’t I. Once this wakes
up we are going to have a lot of fun.”

“Yes,” I say, feeling the need to say something.

Still holding onto my cock, Shannon stands and says.

“I need a quick tinkle. Would you like any? Some of my clients love
it.”

She wants to know if I want to drink her piss. That definitely wasn’t
in any of my emails.

“I expect that’s one of those instances in which it is better to give
than to receive,” I hear myself pronounce pompously.

“We can try that at the end if you like,” Shannon says, “but it will
cost a little extra and you’ll have to stand in the bath. I’ll be right
back.”

Alone in the shabby bedroom, I fold my trousers and place them on the
seat of a chair and hang my jacket on the back.

I should have gone with her of course. I should have watched her pee.
She would probably have sucked my cock while she did it if I’d asked
her too. Perhaps her other clients fuck her on the bathroom floor or
bend her over the toilet bowl once she’s done.

Finally naked, I sit on the clean sheet keeping my feet up off the
floor. I work my cock absently with one hand and start to get a
reasonable response. I haven’t masturbated today. I’ve been saving
myself for Shannon.

Saving myself is part of what this is about of course. Saving myself
from being a good boy. Saving myself from dying without ever having
done anything other than the right thing. Most of all it is about
saving myself from thinking about how home is now and how little I want
to go there.

The toilet flushes. Reassuringly I hear water running into a sink.

Shannon is naked when she returns. I stand as she enters the room.
Without her heels she is even smaller.

“I’m all relaxed now,” she says, pulling my hand by the wrist and
placing it between her legs. “Feel how relaxed I am.”

Her cunt lips are swollen and remarkably slick. I wonder if this is the
impact of all those piercings.

“I lubed the other hole for you as well,” she says, leaning against me,
spreading her legs wider and pushing my hand further back.

Lubricant. Of course. Given the things I’ve asked her to do lubricant
makes perfect sense.

I slide my fingers along the perineum until I find her very well lubed
anus. A gentle push inserts my finger up to the second knuckle.

“That’s nice,” Shannon says, letting herself sigh against my chest.

I have very long fingers, more than an octave span, so I decide to show
off a little. I keep my finger tip in Shannon’s anus and work my thumb
up into her cunt.

Shannon pushes up onto tiptoe but I follow her up and push finger and
thumb towards each other. Shannon sighs convincingly against my chest.
I lower her to the floor and remove my hand.

“So,” she says, taking hold of the hand I’ve had inside her and
pressing her cheek against my palm, “when you told me in your emails
that you wanted to fist me and fuck me in the arse at the same time, I
should have asked about the size of your equipment.”

I should feel flattered I suppose, size is supposed to matter, but my
attention is snagged by the casual way in which she described what I’ve
asked of her. She doesn’t seem to understand what it means or why it
obsesses me.

Janice and I must have fucked a thousand times in the past twelve
years. Sex is a dance we know well and practice with enthusiasm but the
music we dance to is love rather than lust. There are things, dark
things, shameful things, that I simply could not ask her to do. I don’t
want the memory of those things to be behind her eyes when she looks at
me. So I shackle those thoughts, releasing them only when I’m alone in
some hotel room, wanking in the dark, hoping that if I do it long
enough and often enough, I’ll sate my appetite and I can go back to a
time when there was nothing I wanted except Janice.

The masturbation hones the fantasy until there is nothing but the sharp
edge of need. My need is centred on an act which is degrading and
dehumanizing. I want to push my fist into a woman’s cunt and then
sodomise her, making her nothing more than a flesh and blood
masturbation toy. No affection, No intimacy. Just me using her to get
myself off.

Shannon doesn’t seem to know she’s the object of degradation. In a move
she must have copied from a porno movie she makes eye-contact with me
and then slowly sucks the thumb and finger that have been inside her.

“Still, a deals a deal,” she says. “Just make sure you put the right
equipment in the right hole or I won’t be able to walk for a week.”

“I won’t hurt you.” I say, quietly.

“Yes you will love. That’s what makes it worth doing. Now why don’t you
lie down on the bed on your belly and I’ll show you something that will
put the lead in your pencil.”

This echo of my playful session with Janice all those years ago, robs
my cock of any tumescence it once had but I let myself be positioned on
the bed. I don’t even ask why, if I’m going to fuck her arse, Shannon
has positioned me face down.

“This is something that a lot of my clients who are into anal enjoy,”
Shannon says, cheerfully.

Before I can ask what that means, I feel Shannon’s strong hands on my
arse and then her tongue on my anus. The sensation is electrifying and
mortifying in equal measure. She uses long firm licks, each one of
which seems to hit a hundred nerve endings. I move forward on the bed,
wriggling away from the overwhelming mixture of pleasure and
embarrassment. Shannon follows me, pushing her tongue into me with
little stabbing motions.

My cock responds as if I’ve just taken a dozen Viagra. .

“Oh fuck!” I hear myself say.

Shannon doesn’t pause for conversation. Pressing her mouth so close
against my arse that it’s a wonder she can breathe, she adds to the
sensation by reaching between my legs and wanking my cock very firmly.

The orgasm that follows is the strongest I’ve ever experienced. My
sperm shoots out across the bed-sheet time after time as Shannon works
on me.

When there is nothing left, Shannon stops touching me.

My legs are trembling, my forehead is covered in sweat, and my arsehole
feels like it’s glazed with Tabasco.

For a second or two I look down at my spattered sperm with not a
thought in my head. Then, like a sleepwalker waking, I come back to
myself and I know I have been looking for the wrong thing in the wrong
place. It’s time for me to leave.

I stand up and turn around. Shannon is on her knees. Her mouth and chin
glisten with saliva. She takes in the look on my face and says, “Didn’t
you enjoy that, luv?”

“You didn’t take your ring off,” she says, quietly. “The ones who can
do this without a thought take the ring off when they undress.”

I don’t want to listen to Shannon. I want to be gone. I want to be able
to erase the whole afternoon.

“Everything was fine.” I say, shrugging into my jacket.

“But you won’t be a regular will you, luv? You’re not the type.”

No. I’m not the type. I understand that now.

I say goodbye to Shannon, scoop up my laptop bag and hurry back to my
car. Then I sit motionless behind the wheel.

I flip the sun visor down so that I can use the mirror to check for any
outward signs of my inner disgrace. I look no worse than I normally do
after the sweaty end-of-week flight home.

I’d expected to feel guilty, dirty, degraded. I’d expected to want to
do it again.

I hadn’t expected that this loveless, best-fucking-cum-of-my-whole-life
would blow away the numbness that has bound me for the past month.

I’ve always hidden from the difficult things in life. Janice does all
the stuff that deals with money and taxes and legal things that I don’t
want to think about. She collaborates with me on blocking out reality
by filling my time with books and movies and long Sunday mornings in
bed.

When something came along that Janice couldn’t protect me from, I
retreated into my head and picked at my worst sexual fantasies the way
your tongue keeps going back to a rotten tooth. Well, Shannon had
pulled my tooth today, left the stump of it drying on her clean sheet,
now it was time to deal with the pain.

It takes me twenty minutes to drive home. I let the task of grinding
through the rush-hour traffic take all my attention, saving my strength
for when I greet Janice.

Janice’s mum, Lorna, meets me at the door to our house, signalling for
me to be quiet.

“Janice is asleep,” she says.

“Bad day?” I ask.

“She’s been sick a lot. The chemo really takes it out of her. But she’s
staying cheerful.”

“I’ll go and sit with her for a while,” I say.

Lorna hugs me. Part of me is afraid that she will smell the sin on me.
Instead she says. “She’s lucky to have you.”

Shame and regret finally flush through me, occupying the gap between
whom Lorna sees and who I am. I end the hug as quickly as I can and
head upstairs.

Even in sleep, Janice looks ill. In the month since she was diagnosed
with stomach cancer she has lost almost half her bodyweight and all of
her hair.

I never understood what people meant when they talked about “the shadow
of death.” Now I understand that death blocks out the light and fills
you with a dark dread that can drive you insane if you let it.

“You’re home.” Janice’s voice is weak but she sounds pleased to see me.

“Yes,” I say, reaching for her hand. “And I’m going to stay. I’ll email
Paul tonight and tell him I’m taking a couple of weeks off.”

“Thank you,” she says, closing her eyes but keeping hold of my hand.

I want to confess to her. I want to beg for forgiveness. I want her to
punish me for being such a shit. The memory of Shannon’s tongue
pressing into me flares across my mind and I wriggle in discomfort.

When Janice wakes again, I will tell her that I love her. Over the next
few weeks I will try to prove to her and to me that it I mean it.